Before Rise was released, Serkis had begun taking steps to bring an even more ambitious allegorical story told through the eyes of anthropomorphic animals to cinematic life using mo-cap technology, with a new adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. The tentative plan at the time was for Rise director Rupert Wyatt to sit at the helm, with Serkis tackling a motion-capture role (or two).

Reports are in that Serkis now plans to direct Animal Farm, having gotten a crash-course in demanding filmmaking while serving some 200 days as a second-unit director on Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy (in which Serkis reprises his iconic mo-cap role as the fractured Gollum). Moreover, his London-based performance-capture studio The Imaginarium (co-founded by Jonathan Cavendish) has secured the rights to the forthcoming book series The Bone Season.

“We are in proof-of-concept stage at the moment, designing characters and experimenting on our stage with the designs. It is quite a wide canvas as to how much and how far we can take performance capture with quadrupeds and how much we will be using facial [capture]. We are not discounting the use of keyframe animation or puppeteering parts of animals. We are in an experimental phase; it’s terribly exciting.”

Orwell’s source material, of course, makes not-so-subtle reference to the rise of Communism and the Soviet Union, though Serkis mentions “We’re keeping it fable-istic and [aimed at] a family audience. We are not going to handle the politics in a heavy-handed fashion.” That might be for the best, as the political subtext is so fundamental a component of Orwell’s novel that it’s impossible to remove without massive changes to the story; hence, letting the metaphors arise more organically is a good way to go.

Serkis also indicated that Animal Farm will follow in Rise‘s footsteps, with regards to it being told from a genuine non-human perspective, saying “The point of view that we take will be slightly different to how it is normally portrayed and the characters, [we] are examining this in a new light.”

‘Animal Farm’ was brought to life as an animated film in 1954

With regards to Samantha Shannon’s unpublished Bone Season novel, here is a semi-official description:

The Bone Season begins in 2059. Nineteen-year-old Paige Mahoney is working in the criminal underworld of London, based at Seven Dials, employed by a man named Jaxon Hall. She works as an envoy between secret cells: she drops in an out of people’s minds. For Paige is a lucid dreamer, a clairvoyant, and in her world, the world of Scion, she commits high treason simply by breathing. It is raining the day her life changes forever. Attacked, kidnapped and transported to Oxford, a city that has been kept secret for two hundred years, she meets Warden, a Rephaite with dark honey skin and heavy-lidded yellow eyes. He is the single most beautiful and frightening thing she has every laid eyes on – and he will become her “keeper”.

Cavendish commented on Bone Season, saying:

“These books have conjured up with extraordinary detail and delicacy of drama an imaginary future set in a dystopian world. We are just starting to develop that for a series of motion pictures.”

We will keep you posted on the status of both Animal Farm and The Bone Season as more information is released.